If you extract data from iPhones for a living, Stolen Device Protection is the change you can no longer afford to ignore. It does something deceptively simple: it puts Face ID or Touch ID in front of the “Trust This Computer” prompt. The practical result is that an examiner who knows the device passcode still cannot pair an unfamiliar iPhone to a forensic workstation. That is the most disruptive change Apple has made to iPhone pairing behavior in roughly a decade, and as of spring 2026 it is switched on out of the box.

Pulling a backup out of iCloud is one of the more technically demanding jobs in cloud forensics. An iCloud backup is not a single, ready-to-download file; instead, it is assembled from a large number of separate fragments that have to be collected and stitched back together into a coherent backup. Recent changes to Apple’s communication protocols broke things for everyone except Apple themselves, meaning that we had to rework the underlying extraction logic. This is documented in Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 11 Restores iCloud Access.

Extracting cloud data becomes increasingly valuable – and increasingly complex at the same time. In scenarios where a target device is physically unavailable cloud extraction is often the only real way to access evidence. This is particularly relevant when devices are secured by an unknown passcode or locked under Apple’s Stolen Device Protection framework without available biometric authentication, rendering traditional extraction techniques ineffective.

Our customers often ask us which exact iOS versions are supported by iOS Forensic Toolkit. There’s always a temptation to answer “all of them,” and while that answer is technically correct, there are a lot of caveats. The devil is in the details, and the real answer depends on what you mean by “support”.

When an iPhone is seized and later re-examined, forensic teams sometimes find that data present in an earlier extraction are missing from a subsequent backup or filesystem image. Why exactly does that happen, what kinds of data are affected, how long do they usually live, and what can you do to preserve volatile and semi-volatile artifacts? Let’s try to find out.

A forensic examiner receives a locked smartphone – a recent-model iPhone, encrypted and secured with an unknown passcode. No tool works, checkm8 long obsolete, USB port locked. Is this a dead end? Not quite. iPhones don’t operate in isolation. They’re part of a digital ecosystem, and ecosystems often have weak points. This article explores how gaining access through a weak link  can compromise even the most secure smartphone.

Twelve years ago, we introduced an innovative way of accessing iPhone user data, retrieving iPhone backups straight from Apple iCloud. As our iCloud extraction technology celebrates its twelfth anniversary, it’s a fitting moment to reflect on the reactions it has provoked within the IT community. Let us commemorate the birth of the cloud extraction technology, recap the initial reactions from the forensic community, and talk about where this technology stands today.

iOS backup passwords are a frequent topic in our blog. We published numerous articles about these passwords, and we do realize it might be hard for a reader to get a clear picture from these scattered articles. This one publication is to rule them all. We’ll talk about what these passwords are, how they affect things, how to recover them, whether they can be reset, and whether you should bother. We’ll summarize years of research and provide specific recommendations for dealing with passwords.

The first developer beta of iOS 17.3 includes Stolen Device Protection, a major new security feature designed to protect the user’s sensitive information stored in the device and in iCloud account if their iPhone is stolen and the thief gets access to the phone’s passcode. This optional feature could represent a significant change in how Apple looks at security, where currently the passcode is king. At this time, no detailed documentation is available; developers are getting a prompt to test the feature when installing the new beta.

Acquiring data from locked, broken, or inaccessible devices poses significant challenges. However, there are ways to retrieve valuable information from such devices by obtaining the data from iCloud, including old data that has been deleted with no chance of recovery. In this article, we will explore the classic acquisition methods available for iOS devices and focus on the crucial role of Apple iCloud in forensic investigations.